Trauma Farm (18 page)
FARMING IS COMPLICATED ENOUG
H when dealing with the major livestock, but rural people are prone to innovation, and farmers have more dreams than common sense, which is why so many exotic livestock have come and gone through the centuries of domestication on small farms. Only a few notorious herbivores were resistant, like the zebra and the moose, but dozens of others also eventually proved more hassle than they were worth.
“Breeders,” an old farmer contemptuously snorts at exotic livestock, whose only real market is in supplying expensive breeding pairs to other farmers. These are livestock pyramid schemes. When I was a child there was the chinchilla rage. Everyone was going to raise chinchillas in their basements and make millions. As with chain letters the only ones who make money in these affairs are those who start the fad. In the years since we purchased Trauma Farm, I’ve seen Korean pot-bellied pigs, llamas, alpacas, ostriches, yaks, and emus. The original purchase price can range up to $50,000. I know farmers who paid $15,000 for a llama and sold it for $300. They considered themselves lucky to be able to sell it. Ostrich meat is great, and a single egg can feed a family, but the public wasn’t ready to buy ostrich meat and the eggshells ended up as ornaments on shelves. I love ostrich meat and I keep an ostrich femur on a shelf behind my desk, but I’d never raise those birds. They have a kick that can drive a farmer through a barn wall. Collecting an egg might get your back broken. Despite all this I can’t help but admire the intrepid farmers willing to take on the weird and the wild. One day, another “breeder” might yet become a success, as has happened in the past.
Aside from the peafowl—who have given us more than enough grief—and some exotic chickens, we’ve stuck to the standard livestock, knowing we couldn’t learn all their ways in twenty lifetimes. Every animal that has set hoof or paw or claw on Trauma Farm has been a teacher.
H
OWARD, MIKE’S BROTHER
, lounged in the old chair beneath the Byrons’ carport while I hauled on the handle, squeezing the juice out of the apple mash. “Pull harder!” He laughed like a mad galley-master on a slave ship as I threw a last heave into the press, sweating in the cool October air. This was a decade ago and Howard was in his mid-seventies, wiry and full of laughter, wearing his favourite, frazzled fedora. His ancient giant of a border collie, Big Mac, slept at his feet.
One of the Byron clan that settled the island in the Depression years, he not only worked his own farm but leased several others, running his Jacob sheep—the four-horned bicoloured black-and-white breed whose bizarre face was often used as the face of the devil in Christian iconography— on their fields. He also tended orchards. The Brown orchard was the biggest, about 150 acres with at least two hundred apple trees.
The domestic apple arrived on Salt Spring around 1860, and our orchards peaked at the turn of that century as land was cleared and fruit planted for the gold rush of ’98. A crate of winter apples in a cabin was a miner’s source of vitamin C back then. Today Salt Spring is rich with ecologists who have been rebuilding these legacy orchards and planting more heritage fruit. The island is rapidly becoming one of the larger fruit tree resources in North America. There are over 350 varieties of apple on the island.
Snow apples. Spartan, Spy, Winter Banana, Gravenstein, Wolf River, Belle de Boskoop, Ben Davis . . . The Ben Davis is a legendary hard, winter apple that suddenly sweetens and softens in January. During the Depression boys used them for baseballs until Christmas arrived. Like many winter apples, the Ben Davis travelled well in barrels, but all these apples are increasingly endangered as they are replaced by the sweeter, showier apples designed to match globalization’s evolving transportation and cold storage systems. Few farmers like Howard remain. You only had to show him an apple and he could tell you its name, its storage characteristics, and whether it was best for juice, baking, drying, storage, or eating straight up, and he could probably name the girl he gave one to when he was a teenager, after polishing it up on his blue jeans.
We’d picked close to five hundred feed bags full of apples earlier in the week and were only half finished our pressing, sugar-stoned on the juice. Howard could dip his glass into our barrel, taste the juice, and know what variety to mix in. “More Grimes, more Grimes,” he’d say, waving his glass about. Then he wanted Wolf River because the flavour was too strong and we needed to thin it with a juicier apple. He was an apple gourmand, and it was a thrill watching him blend our juice while I grunted at the press. “Bring ten more bags of the kings and a couple of Cox’s orange pippin. We need to sweeten this batch up.” His commands made me recall Thoreau’s ageless “Wild Apples” essay: “Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming traits even to the eye.”
We squeezed many hundreds of gallons of juice, more than enough to drink and sell for the winter. So we decided to brew ten gallons of hard cider with the remainder. In one of those unfortunate “inspired” moments I also used the leftover mash to make apple wine. It was the most awful wine I’ve ever fermented—bittered by the seeds and stems that weren’t winnowed out of the mash. Since I’m stubborn, I banged together an improvised still I could perk on the wood stove, and somehow distilled the lousy wine into a great Calvados. It was an apple brandy to die for, literally. I refined fifteen gallons down to six beer bottles of brew that was better than some of the $100 bottles of French Calvados I’ve tangled with, but the proof level was through the roof, and even watered down it could nearly make you go blind. My liver still quivers at the memory of it. The Calvados was so scarily successful I decided to end my moonshining career after the one batch, and the still went to the dump.
THE TRICK ABOUT GATHERING
apples for juice is never to take windfalls, no matter how good they look, because deer graze the orchards, and they can excrete salmonella onto the grass and infect the crop. You won’t have trouble if you are clean and careful and keep away from the windfalls. Islanders have been happily drinking unpasteurized apple juice for 150 years, but that’s because we’re local and small scale. The chances for contamination of big batches of apple juice grow exponentially with the size of the corporation making it, so it’s hard to sympathize with our ministries, which are regulating small orchardists out of existence by demanding that we pasteurize our juice, which can’t be done economically on such a small scale. Now the good juice is going the way of real milk, underground and through the back door. I buy any extra I need if I can find it. Sudden guerrilla forays of juicers will appear at Fulford Harbour, the word spreads, and everyone rushes down and purchases the juice, usually as a benefit for a local institution. Then everyone disappears before the apple police show up.
When we raised pigs we’d throw the windfalls into their yard, and they’d kick up their heels in delight. Even though their stomachs are similar to ours, they never have trouble eating windfalls. The ancient tradition was to run the pigs in orchards at fall. This is a perfect way of “finishing” the pig and sweetening its flesh, along with cleaning up the orchard. Diet has a terrific effect on meat. “Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are,” the gastronomist Brillat-Savarin said. He knew what he was talking about. A neighbour who had a fish farm once tried raising pigs on his “morts,” the dead fish from the aquafarm—killed by seals or otters or whatever—accomplishing two tasks simultaneously, raising the pigs and disposing of the fish waste. Personally, I would have made fish fertilizer. Even though he finished the pigs on a grain and apple diet for their last two months, their meat still tasted so fishy it was inedible. The nature of small farming almost demands brilliant ideas that don’t always work, but every once in a while the Dutch hoe or the Leghorn chicken gets invented.
HOWARD DIED THE YEAR
after that autumn of many apples. Besides being a great farmer, he was also the island dog catcher. He could be harsh and accurate with the gun, and he was one of the most tender men with animals I ever met. He raised a blind deer and a crippled crow as pets. At Howard’s funeral half the community showed up, farmers, loggers, the gay crowd, bikers, sculptors, poets, and developers. It was perhaps the most spectacular assortment of islanders from different worlds I’ve seen assembled. His beat-up cap was placed on his coffin and when they lowered the coffin into the ground, Mac, his collie, devoted to the end, tried to leap into the grave. There wasn’t a dry eye in the crowd.
When they covered him with dirt they were burying an enormous knowledge of apples, sheepdogs, gardening skills, and livestock behaviour—a great raft of pages out of the book of local history. Another library gone to the ground.
“
WHEN’S THE BEST TIME
to prune your fruit trees?” a man asked Mike Byron, an orchardist equal to his brother in knowledge.
“When you have the time,” he replied.
The orchard needs to live through four seasons and is both stronger and more tender than we expect. In our temperate climate there’s only a couple of months of true dormancy. Pruning is like doing crossword puzzles. It’s an art, a drudgery, and a test of decision-making skills. The reasons why some people can’t prune are simple—they’re either afraid of making decisions or incapable of making them.
Pruning is an easy and meditative art if you have a set of good, sharp tools—a pole pruner with a tip saw, loppers, and a set of bypass hand pruners. A bucket of water mixed with bleach is also good for sterilizing your tools between trees. First, you eliminate the water shoots, those vertical suckers that want to set a new crown; then you remove all your cross-branches and those that rub against each other. On an established tree, this is most of your pruning. If you remove more than a third of the branches, you will inflict excess work on yourself in the following year, since a healthy tree rejects too much pruning and will rebel by shooting up thousands of unruly suckers.
The only time harsh pruning can be justified is if you are dealing with sickness and neglect, such as canker-struck trees or split-limbed, near-fatal damage. Before our apple pressing adventures, I watched Howard Byron spend a couple of years reviving the century-old Brown orchard, which meant, in some cases, chainsawing the trees down to their trunks. I called this the Texas Chainsaw school of tree pruning, which he found amusing. These trees suckered like porcupines and were weak for lack of leaves to feed the roots, but within a few years he recreated the classic fruit tree bowl shape, pruning less each year as the trees renewed.
Well-tended orchards can date back many years. One orchard in England is known to be four centuries old. Most fruit trees will last less than fifty years these days. Modern apples are grafted onto weak, dwarfing rootstock. They fruit sooner and can be planted in less space, and the apples are easy to pick in the industrialized orchards. But they’re cultivated with the knowledge that they’ll lose their vigour in ten to twenty years. Grafting onto this inferior rootstock is the equivalent of putting a permanent tourniquet on a tree trunk. Fruit farming is no longer a tradition passed on to our children.